It was very early in her career as a stand-up comic; only one year in, to be exact. The cable channel Showtime, in need of programming, went looking for someone on whom to bestow the title Funniest Person in America. They found Ms. DeGeneres, working as an emcee at a comedy club in New Orleans, her hometown. She was young and smart on stage, relying on offbeat storytelling, strategic pauses and dramatic facial expressions that reminded some people of Bob Newhart. But her material was, as she now admits, a bit thin: "I didn't have many minutes."

Within a few months, she was touring the country in a Winnebago with a large nose above the front bumper. "Big noses are funny," she explains over a glass of spring water at B. Smith's restaurant in Manhattan.

Now, a dozen years later, Ms. DeGeneres has a shot at being the funniest person on television -- or at least one of them. She is starring in a new ABC comedy series, "These Friends of Mine," about a group of single people in Los Angeles, where she lives. The series began three weeks ago, receiving hit-size ratings so far.

Ms. DeGeneres (rhymes with "generous"), might have expected more rapid stardom, but it wasn't easy being the funniest person in America; not when you're 24 and only a couple of years beyond your first stage performance, which consisted of standing up in front of a crowd and eating a Whopper, fries and a shake.

She's not eating today. The water she's sipping constitutes lunch. She's not hungry, she says.

A medium-size woman who moves with the physicality of an athlete (she once thought of playing golf professionally), Ms. DeGeneres looks a bit younger than she is: 36. She has concluded that her features are "too rubberized" for television, but in person her large round periwinkle eyes and rosy cheeks suggest good health. The last hints of Southern twang drift through her words as she describes her road to prime time.

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- her early honorific, the comedy learning process was tough and humiliating. "All the people working in the club would get on stage and try to blow me away because they were angry and bitter that I didn't have the experience, and here I was surpassing them," she says.

One night in a club in San Francisco, an "Andrew Dice Clay-type comic" had stirred the crowd into a raucous frenzy before introducing Ms. DeGeneres, whose signature comedy piece, then and now, is a subtle, poignant, brilliant bit called "a phone call to God." When she came on stage that night and dialed long distance to the heavens, the crowd got ugly.

"The front row was a bunch of guys who actually stood up, turned their chairs around and faced the other way," she says. Many excruciating minutes later, Ms. Degeneres fled the stage, and the gleeful comic returned.

"The audience was laughing at him saying over and over, 'One more time for the FUNNIEST (pause) PERSON (pause) IN AMERICA!' " Ms. Degeneres still cringes visibly from the memory. "I was crying," she adds. "I wanted to go home and get out of the business. I thought, 'This is the worst business; it's so cruel.' "

She got over it.

The experience was useful for several reasons. She got an agent. Her bookings improved. Eventually, she was spotted at yet another competition, the San Francisco Comedy Festival. This time she finished second, edged out by Sinbad. But she had been seen by "some of the big people from L.A.," she says.

Fresh from a morning round of television interviews to pump her series, Ms. DeGeneres has turned up at B. Smith's with her face stripped clean of makeup, dressed for comfort in jeans, a white T-shirt, and blue pin-striped blazer. Her only pass at what she would call "styling" is a newsboy cap squeezed down backward on her head, capturing all but an inch or so of her mid-length blond hair.

Ms. DeGeneres grew up partly in New Orleans and partly in Atlanta, Tex., the small town she moved to after her parents divorced and her mother remarried. It was there that she realized she just might be funny.

"My mother was going through some really hard times and I could see when she was really getting down, and I would start to make fun of her dancing," she recalls. "Then she'd start to laugh and I'd make fun of her laughing. And she'd laugh so hard she'd start to cry, and then I'd make fun of that. So I would totally bring her from where I'd seen her start going into depression to all the way out of it. As a 13-year-old kid, I learned I could manipulate people that way. That's a really powerful thing.

"But also I saw I could make somebody happy. And my mother was someone whom I idolized. She's my mother, yet I'm changing her."

The days in Texas added an extra layer of skin that has become useful to Ms. DeGeneres. Her toughness and savvy are belied by her comic style, which is grounded in understatement and quirky thought, like dialing up God or being adopted by Iroquois Indians.

"These Friends of Mine," on for a fourth time tonight at 9:30, is the latest comedy to benefit from being paired with television's hottest comedy, "Home Improvement," which it follows. It has performed beyond some people's expectations. Indeed, ABC held the show off the air in the fall.

But she is not one who shared any doubts about the series. "I told my friends it would be the No. 3 show." When the ratings came in, Ms. Degeneres had hit it precisely.

It's not clairvoyance. She says, "I'm not like this in Las Vegas," where she plays cards between performances at the hotels. But Ms. DeGeneres does believe in destiny. Take that phone call to God, in which she asks about the purpose of fleas.

God and the fleas came together in New Orleans, when Ms. DeGeneres was just out of high school, sharing an apartment with her best friend. One night, she drove past a horrifying car accident. The next morning, she learned that her roommate, on a date, had been killed in that very wreck.

Despondent, broke and forced to move, Ms. DeGeneres found herself living in a flea-ridden dump, sleeping on a mattress. "I'm laying on the floor, wide awake, thinking, 'Here's this beautiful girl, 23 years old, who's just gone,' " she says. "So I started writing what it would be like to call God and ask why fleas are here and this person is not.

"But my mind just kicked into what all of a sudden would happen if you actually picked up the phone and called God. How it would take forever, how it would ring for a long time because . . . it's a big place.

"And it was like something came through me. I remember writing it nonstop, not thinking what would happen next. And when I finished it, I read it and said: 'I'm going to do that on Johnny Carson one day. And he's going to love it. And he's going to invite me to sit on the couch.' I knew it was more than funny. I knew it was classic. And it saved me."

Six years and one F.P.A. award later, Ms. DeGeneres was finally picked for the "Tonight" show. She did the phone call from God. When she was done, Mr. Carson crooked his finger and signaled her to his side, the first and only woman comic ever to be so beckoned in her first appearance on "Tonight."

More "Tonight" shows followed, along with better club bookings, then theater appearances. She got a few small parts in television shows. She did some now well-recognized commercials for Very Fine juices (accompanied by some dancing fruit).

Finally, the script she had been waiting for arrived on her doorstep.

"I was laughing out loud when I read the script," she says. "I knew what I could do with it. I wanted to do a smarter, hipper version of 'I Love Lucy,' only don't take it so far that I'm in a man's suit with a mustache trying to fool Ricky that I'm not his wife. I wanted a show that everybody talks about the next day."

So far, a lot of the talking about "These Friends of Mine" has centered on its similarity to -- if not outright photocopying of -- another television hit, "Seinfeld."

In Ms. DeGeneres's series a group of quirky, single friends sit around sort of aimlessly and involve themselves in each other's lives. Rather than three men and one woman, however, as in "Seinfeld," "These Friends of Mine" consists of three women and one man.

"Well, our kitchen is on the other side of the set," Ms. DeGeneres adds.

She concedes that there is some validity to the charges of Seinfeld-sameness. "I thought it was like 'Seinfeld' because that's sort of what I represent," she says. "I'm a single woman and I didn't want to play a housewife or mom. I wanted to play a single woman. It probably was written with 'Seinfeld' as a huge influence. I wasn't in the room."

"I love Jerry," she continues. "I think he's got a great show. But I've always been compared to Jerry. And if you saw my act, we're not very much alike at all."

Ms. DeGeneres said that unlike Mr. Seinfeld's trademark observational humor, she depends much more on subtlety and misdirection in her act, with elaborate set pieces, like one in which she obsesses about following a good-looking guy home.

"I like the observational stuff," she says. "There's a brilliance to finding a simple thing. Like people writing 'over' at the bottom of a letter." Pause. "Like I'm that much of a moron. I'm not going to look over. 'Gee I wonder what happened to her. She stopped right in the middle here.'

"I love that stuff, but it's like the lowest common denominator. I like taking you on the whole ride. Yet, I still get compared to Seinfeld."

She pauses -- her trademark -- again. "They're even trying to get me to dress more like him."

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A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 1994, on Page C00001 of the National edition with the headline: AT LUNCH WITH: Ellen DeGeneres; Dialed God (Pause). He Laughed. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe